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I have to say I'm no slouch when it comes to researching things but the thing that infuriates me about Linux in general is that it can take hours to solve a seemingly simple task just because of the sheer number of different versions of various things.Anyway I'm running Mint 13 KDE and besides annoyances like the terrible transparency of the "task bar" and other panels and the fact that changing to darker colour schemes makes you have to manually track down which text in certain boxes are the same colour as the new background colour for those boxes in the new scheme and manually change them, and so on; (I'm having a hard time not digressing if you couldn't tell ) my issue now is just getting my phone and voice to work reliably and not sound like crap basically. (a software solution to automatically change my GPU fan speed based on temperature seems like a luxury now)

I have a VOIP phone solution that in windows with 3CX phone system works very well but I use 2 different SIP accounts, one for my incoming calls through a phone number and the other to make calls through (just because it's way cheaper that way). I've tried a few solutions Linphone and Ekiga, but suffice it to say they've each had their own problems. I had to try to use the browser-based phone client for my incoming SIP account through Chromium but only speaker audio worked; the mic is extremely muffled and the tone is downshifted in a weird way. I tried both pulse audio and alsa both have the same issues, also changing levels doesn't work. In Ekiga it's much less muffled but is quiet and still muffled so is unusable.Mumble used to sound fine, then was having issues with "robotic" speech, and only while trying to switch between alsa and pulse audio as my sound system or w/e it's called and not changing any mumble settings, somehow it got itself back to sounding normal; mic input there sounds perfect (I know mumble does a lot of filtering but the difference is like night and day compared to even unfiltered windows mic input).

IDK if anyone has some insight for these issues for me, because they're a deal breaker for using Linux at all; also, maybe somebody could explain why there's these different audio solutions being used and why they're so unreliable. Do they in any way relate to KDE? If so what should I use to maximize hardware compatibility?

Ahhhh, Linux sound. It's so fragmented that it's not even funny. You can look at the Pulse documentation to see if that helps at all. You can also try different sound servers to see if that fixes your issues. OSS and JACK come to mind.Also, the KDE stuff you are mentioning is pretty typical. You can install Cinnmamon and see if you like it better. It's much easier to configure.